Fighting mental illness stigmas (Part 4 of 4)

in #steemstem • 7 years ago (edited)

| Image: "Shine In Your Crazy Diamond," by Marco Antonio Gutierrez Hurtado | Source: Flickr | Rights: (CC BY-SA 2.0) |

Word Count: 811 | Est. Reading Time: 2:57 min | Readability Rating: A

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you." - Jalaluddin Rumi

A Conclusion of Sorts

This is Part 4 of a four-part series about fighting mental health stigma.

You can read my initial Twitter response to depression skeptic Andrew Tate here, which includes links to a number of articles and scientific studies on American suicide statistics and the physical evidence of depression; my follow-up response on the mental health issues facing the 9/11 first responders here; and finally, my thread on the scientific literature researching the relationship between inflammation and depression here. Here are also some links to the Wikipedia articles on depression and mental illness.

In Part 3, I showed how Tate misleads his followers with fake evidence. By promoting magical thinking, he dismisses the very real medical problem of depression.

You don't have to be a victim. Healing is possible, and we know this because the scientific method works, not because someone on the Internet says so. And the method shows that depression is real, measurable, and attributable to much suffering around the globe.

As I said in Part 2, I'm not asking anyone to trust me, I'm not asking people to hate Tate, and I'm not advocating for certain mental health treatments. That is between the individual and their support network. In Part 1, I showed how mental illness stigma can keep people from getting the help they need.

My quarrel is not with Tate, but the digital rage machine that dehumanizes us all. I wrote about this idea in a previous Steemit post. I have no desire to be further drawn into the spectacle of its antics.

Thank you for reading,

Josh

For lists of international suicide prevention hotlines, you can click here, here, here, and here.

For guides on responsible media reporting about suicide, click here, here, and here.

Series Navigation: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4**

Further Reading

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View Steemit blockchain activity/edit history | View draft edit history on Github | View My Steemit Archive on GitHub

Josh Peterson is a 2016 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow and a writer living in Denver, CO.
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#writing #mental-health #social-media #science
7 years ago in #steemstem by
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     7 years ago 

    Added the "science" tag, since this series is focused on promoting science as a way to combat mental illness stigma, and I fixed the links for the two YouTube videos cited in the Further Reading section for this piece.

    I also upvoted this comment to put ahead of the twitterbot that spammed my comments. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am self-upvoting my posts for this series, which is a first for me, because I believe that they're important enough to do so and I want to people to see them.

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     7 years ago 

    jdpeterson Josh Peterson tweeted @ 08 Sep 2017 - 08:48 UTC

    @Cobratate Depression kills people. I wish that it didn't.

    jdpeterson Josh Peterson tweeted @ 13 Sep 2017 - 08:04 UTC

    I am not your doctor, and nothing I say should be perceived as medical advice. I'm just trying to help demythologize this whole thing.

    jdpeterson Josh Peterson tweeted @ 12 Sep 2017 - 05:41 UTC

    So I've been thinking a lot about the #mentalhealth impact of #Sept11th on the #FirstResponders: wikiwand.com/en/Health_effe…

    Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
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